Project Artemis - The Revenants
by Dr. Artemis
Summary: Revenants are spirits who have returned to exact vengeance on those who have wronged them.
1. Prologue

I force myself to watch in the mirror, as I suffer through every crippling hangover. The nice thing about raging alcoholism is that your diet usually consists exclusively of fluids, so it's easy to wash down a sink with a running tap. Plus there's the fresh, cool water piped straight from the valley walls of this frozen hellhole.

 _Gotta stay hydrated, right?_

 _I'll spew my guts, choking and whimpering between particularly violent bouts, and every few minutes look opposite-me in the eye and groan " **augh . . . never** again."_

 _Now, I like to think I'm referring to the **drinking,** because usually I go right back to emptying the deepest, darkest corners of my insides. _

_Typically, this lasts at least a day, and I mean all **93 fucking hours of it.**_

 _Then there's recovery, where I've wedged myself as deep as possible into the loveseat I have instead of a bed. (Oh **god** . . . I burned that thing years ago, I promise. Now, as a rule, I black out on the floor. A mop and bucket works so much easier on alien tiling than it does on a tempurpedic.)_

 _And through all the pain, and sweats, and panicked staggers to the bathroom, I keep telling myself "never again. **Never fucking again.** " _

_I know I'm an idiot every time I reach for that first bottle. I'm mentally screaming **"NO! YOU FOOL!"** and considering running down to Rosie's workshop to run both my hands through his cold-saw. _

_But I'm **weak**. Got no moral constitution, I can readily admit to that._

 _And . . . a bottle's usually the closest thing at hand after my intestines stop aching and I've managed to unlock my spine from the fetal position._

 _There's a lot of them scattered around the base, and most of them always seem to be full._

 _I don't remember being stationed here with **this** much booze, and considering it's been what? **Six years** since we've had any contact with the galaxy beyond this godforsaken alien frost-giant? You'd think, given the amount I consumed **alone** after we realized the human race had been wiped out, we'd have run out a few weeks later._

 _Yeah, you heard me right._

 _Humanity's **gone**. We lost the war, very badly, and the aliens wiped us out. _

_So now we're stranded here. **Forever.**_

 _Get the whole raging alcoholism thing now? Trust me when I say, I'm not the only one down here who does._

 _Like I said, the radio went dark about six years ago. There were no more commands, no more reports to file, no more instructions for excavating the alien installation buried in this valley._

 _At **first,** when we lost the sat-comm uplink, we figured it must be some technical problem up in space. They'd send a repair ship, and that would at least reestablish contact with us._

 _But then the supply ships stopped making their drops._

 _We figured maybe there was a snafu. No more communications means no more supply orders, after all, so they must have thought we were **conserving,** or something._

 _According to the dusty protocol booklet our comm officer Erin managed to find, the UNSC would mount a search-and-rescue operation if they didn't hear from us in three weeks. So we went about our daily lives counting down the hours until the next drop ship touched down._

 _A slip space jump is easy to spot, anywhere above the planet. We were confident, so Rosie manned the scopes for a while. Three weeks became **three months,** and by that point Rosie had company at the radar console. We were practically **living** in that room by then. _

_But we never picked up any slip space contacts._

 _There were no more ships. Those alien **bastards** must have tracked down every last one._

 _ **Aah . . .** I don't want to talk about it. _

_Permanent exile, especially when you're trapped in a glacial valley, has a way of driving you crazy. And we've **all** lost it, that much is clear._

 _Remember, I'm not the only one with a problem._

 _It's funny, I never thought losing my mind would be so . . . **literal.** I didn't know amnesia was one of the primary side-effects. Actually, besides the major substance abuse running rampant in the base, it might be the **only** side-effect most of us are experiencing._

 _Bear in mind, the key word here is **"most"** , but don't worry. I'm not the one who's gone off the deep end._

 _Yet._

 _I've watched my memories run away from me for years now. Usually it's the little stuff, unimportant things like where I was born, who my parents were, where I grew up, why in god's name I ever sign up for the military._

 _Of course, that doesn't mean I don't know why I'm here. The Mission is the one thing I'm still clear on. As is the rest of us . . . well, you know. **Most** of us._

 _Ah yes. **The Mission.**_

 _It wasn't the brightest the UNSC ever came up with. In fact, whenever I think about, it seems downright retarded._

 _What were those idiots hoping to accomplish, sending the most unqualified soldiers in the galaxy to investigate the site of a top-secret alien installation the government had uncovered? (I may have some memory loss, but I can remember enough about Basic to know that yeah, we were **all** a bunch of fuck-ups before going crazy.)_

 _We have all the original mission statements and orders. It's what helps us remember._

 _Apparently, the government was doing some sort of geo-survey on the planet when they stumbled across a shaft of ice leading into a continental glacier. That's how they found the original site. Now, the discovery of alien structures like this wasn't new, and by now archeologists had examined enough of them they were **pretty** sure of themselves:_

 _Where there's one base, there's **two.** Usually facing each other, some distance apart. So they started digging. _

_It took them a while to realize their mistake. They had used the base's center entrance to plot a line out towards where they thought they'd find the second. There were two side openings, and a solid back wall. Turns out the aliens had just decided to wall that back entrance off. (Who knows how extraterrestrial remodeling works?) As it turns out, it was one of the side entrances that led to the other base._

 _After that embarrassment, they dug back to it and managed to excavate it as well. To cut the labor costs, they left a **huge** chunk of the glacier blocking most of the center of what would have been a giant caldera._

 _I guess they called the place **"Sidewinder"** to remind those archeologists of their screw-up._

 _The 405th Squad, **my** team, got posted to provide security for the sites when more important discoveries were made during the war. _

_In the meantime, we were told to excavate the structures, catalog any and all technology we encountered, and work on identifying all the ancient runes and hieroglyphs the aliens liked to carve into the walls._

 _Of course, none of us had any clue about the Forerunners until after we were given our briefings. **And** we sure as hell didn't know the first things about any alien technology, languages, or even how to **excavate** the damn things. We signed up to be soldiers. Really **crappy** soldiers, but soldiers nonetheless._

 _Our mission was given a code name. REVENANT._

 _Sometimes . . . there's something about that name that seems familiar._


	2. Chapter 1

" _I will **not** jeopardize the culmination of my life's work with one psyche evaluation. We have all the necessary resources to secure the . . . confidentiality of the breached subject matter. This program is already committed, and fully underway. We **cannot** afford to lose our momentum, especially over something so trivial as night terrors. I'm authorizing a complete memory dump into the central processors. We're going to need extensive recoding to make this disappear."_

 _-Internal Memos_

The bridge of the _Indomitable_ shuddered under the force of an impact that herald the scoring of another direct hit. Warning klaxons blared across the threat board and all crew stations. The air was putrid with the scent of scorched electrics and the telltale smoke of an internal fire raging somewhere on the cruiser's lower decks.

An armored gauntlet large enough to cup his head in its palm reached down to grab Thomas Beagle by the collar of his own armor suit, and haul him back on his feet.

"You sure know how to throw one hell of a homecoming," Isabel Benderez grunted in her thick Caribbean accent.

He tossed the hulking warrior a rueful smile, immediately realizing how pointless the gesture was beneath his own expressionless visor. _Old habits die hard, I guess._

They braced themselves against the central holo-tank as the ship was rocked again.

"When I said I wanted to make an entrance, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind," he managed as they knocked into each other.

It was a lie, and they both knew it. The _Indomitable's_ jump in-system had ripped a gaping hole in the fabric of space, large enough to fill . . . well, a cruiser. That kind of anomaly usually didn't go unnoticed by planetary defenses.

 _Although it sure would have been_ _ **great**_ _if it did._

"Give me an update on those ships, XO!" he shouted to the only other man not currently strapped down who had managed to keep his footing.

"Sir! Both carriers have moved to engage us." the man replied coolly. "The _Huntress_ is recharging her main gun, but her last shot cored the secondary hangar deck. We've lost most of our fighter reserves, and got a fire burning through Section E, aft."

On the holographic display, a pair of red-painted signatures closed ominously with the green profile of the _Indomitable_.

" _Virgin's_ primary weapon systems are offline. She's coming about on our flank. Wait one . . . confirm! _Virgin_ has matched course with ours."

"Prepare for broadside," Thomas replied, more calmly than he felt.

Isabel leaned in to study the display as best she could, just as _Indomitable_ shuddered again. "They're going for a broadside? Against a Halcyon?"

"They must be counting on _Huntress_ disemboweling us before we can finish them off."

In an even fight, a space cruiser always outmatched a carrier. When it could divert the entirety of its systems and arsenal on destroying that one ship, victory was a forgone conclusion. The _Indomitable_ might have been mothballed by the USNC as outdated, but it was still a proud, albeit old, goddamn cruiser.

Facing both the carrier and her sister, though . . . _**hell**_ _with it! Let's see how close we get to our objective before taking them down with us._

"Helm, maintain course and increase speed. Gunners! Target the _Virgin_!"

"Gunners zeroed in, sir!" reported a tech from his station.

"Fire!"

The space between the dueling leviathans was crisscrossed by a withering storm of kinetic rounds. They left sinister contrails thick as tree trunks to slowly fade into the void. Explosions blossomed over both the dueling ships' hulls. Hundreds of new stars seemed to wink into existence around them. In reality, it was the debris they were quickly kicking up.

The _Indomitable_ weathered the initial assault as best she could. Her thick armor plating helped shrug off a majority of the inflicted damage.

The _Virgin_ was not so lucky. Though she continued to flank her opponent, there was plenty of evidence that the cruiser's unforgiving salvo had been much more damning than her own. Her hull was pock-marked with ugly, smoldering craters. Billowing plumes of oxygen suggested she'd been significantly breached in at least three places. She was beginning to list slightly, secondary turrets still firing defiantly at her tormentor. But many of her harder-hitting batteries had fallen silent.

For the first time since the jump, Thomas was beginning to think there might actually be a chance to even the odds. Maybe even get the _Indomitable_ into planetary orbit.

Being able to train her primary cannon on whatever significant military target they could locate on the ground was appealing. Even if the other response ships caught up to her after a single firing, it might actually give them _something_ of an edge when they took the fight to the ground.

Suddenly, the holographic image of the _Virgin_ began to shift.

The stricken carrier fought her list and began to roll over and away from the cruiser. As _Indomitable_ continued her relentless bombardment, the armored ventral bay doors of her opponent slid open.

At once the holo-tank began registering dozens of tiny red dots leaving the _Virgin,_ on a fast approach towards the cruiser.

 _ **Landing pods!**_

The faint, brief hope he had vanished in an instant. "They're sending boarders!"

 _Huntress_ never broke off her pursuit, but her main gun fell silent. That didn't stop her from continuing to pepper the _Indomitable_ with her turrets.

The landing pods made for small, fast targets. They were impossible to target efficiently with any heavy weaponry. Even if a stray shot did get lucky and incinerate a pod, that was what? One kill in . . . the onboard computers were strained from the battle. Their estimates put the total at somewhere over fifty.

 _No way we can hold this ship against that many men. Not without taking **heavy** losses. This war will be **over** before it starts. And even if we do hold, how long will those carriers wait before they decide the boarding party failed?_

Thomas unlimbered his assault rifle. Isabel had already loaded her pair of customized grenade launchers.

"XO, you have the bridge. Order Mongoose, Scorpion, and Raven Companies to secure this ship and hold their positions. We'll be joining them shortly."

The weight of what he was about to do rested heavily on his shoulders, alongside the responsibility for every life aboard _Indomitable_.

"Accelerate to maximum power. Divert anything we've got left to the engines. We're running."

His trusted lieutenant never flinched. "Sir, the _Huntress_ is still engaged, and the _Virgin_ is coming about. They will easily keep pace with us. We're outnumbered. At this rate, we won't be reaching orbit."

Thomas found himself smiling again. It always seemed to be ruefully, these days. _God damn, I gotta break this habit now that no one can see me._

"I know. Order all hands to man their evac stations. Load as much heavy equipment as possible on the transports, and tell the men to clear out the armories and magazine. Launch whatever fighters we have left . . . Launch everything we have! We're abandoning ship."

"Case Black . . ." Isabel groaned.

There was a noticeable hush among the bridge crew. For a moment, everyone was silent, even as the deck rumbled and pitched.

Thomas nodded once to his executive officer. "Give the order."

" _This is the XO, all hands, man your evac stations. We are executing Case Black."_

Amidst the chaos of a full evacuation, the two armored soldiers made their way aft. There were only two places the landing pods could attach to the cruiser: her port and starboard docking collars. E Deck.

" _Launch crews, prep all transports for immediate departure. All pilots, report to their stations. We are executing Case Black."_

"Hey, you know, out of all the contingencies we planned for," Isabel began as they shouldered their way through the crowd, "this was definitely the one I liked the least."

"And here . . . I thought . . . you were going to complain . . . about how . . . it's racist . . . or something." Thomas managed to finish, promptly colliding with a sixth person.

Even at 6' 6", he was easily dwarfed by the Caribbean giant. After some more jostling, he let her lead. She parted the throng of scurrying techs, marines, and crew like a rock in a stream.

 _Marines, report to your checkpoints. Prepare to repel boarders._

"I'd rather complain about the possibilities of committing suicide." she went on. "You really think this is going to work? Scattering and going to ground?"

"My father's loyalists should be waiting for us when we touch down. After what was done to his army, I'm convinced that guerrilla warfare and the coordination of an effective civilian resistance seems our only hope for ending this war."

He didn't add his own misgivings for the entire campaign. _The last time a resistance managed to effectively remove their enemies' occupation, humanity was still on Earth._ _ **And**_ _they weren't splintering their forces over an entire goddamn_ _ **planet**_ _to do so, either._

All at once, _Indomitable_ shook and groaned. This wasn't a hit. Somewhere in the lower decks, bulkheads were giving way.

"Sir!" the XO's voice came in over Thomas's radio, "We've been breached! Raven Company is not responding to our hails! Something's loose in Engineering, it just blew one of the containment shield to our reactor!"

They froze. Isabel holstered her grenade launchers and pumped the shotgun that had been slung over her back only a second before.

"Oh god. She found us."


End file.
